A NOTE ON THE NEW NOVEL
THE writing of a novel is always a collaboration—like the production' of any other work of imaginative art. One of the collaborators is chiefly con¬cerned with form; he takes the mate¬rial offered him by his partner, chooses among it, arranges it, makes his pattern with it. The other collab¬orator is largely responsible for scope, but he affects form by the quality and abundance of the material he offers and by the strength of his desire to have it used. These two collaborators have had many names in the history of art. They are now fashionably known as the conscious mind and the subconscious. They have been much studied by the psychologists of late; the terms of their collaboration, in life as in art, are becoming more or less known; and that knowledge is impor tant in any consideration of the form and scope of the novel. The conscious mind has been de¬scribed as a sort of hand that has de¬veloped out of the subconscious in order the better to grasp and manipu¬late reality. As a hand, it is always busy trying to arrange in some sort of comprehensible picture the chaos and muddle of facts around us. It is al¬ways making patterns—patterns of cause and effect, patterns of natural law or moral law, patterns of beauty, patterns of sequence and theme and recognizable purpose. Into art, it puts design and symmetry and bal¬ance and symphony and all those other qualities that make the disorder of actuality less bewildering to look upon. It continually leaves outside of its pattern great numbers of facts which it can not fit into its immediate arrangement—and uses these subse¬quently in other patterns. And, under the name of criticism, it studies its past patterns and deduces what it calls the laws of art from these per¬formances and tries to make all future performances conform to those laws. But the subconscious mind—the dream mind—seems to have little re¬spect for reality and less for pattern. It furnishes its material to intelligence under impulses of its own. It is the primitive animal mind, emotional, instinctive and sympathetically intui¬tive. It merely dreams dreams, making for itself pictures that express instinctive desires, and apparently get¬ting relief for instinctive tensions in mere hallucinations of relief. And the psychic origin and impulse behind these hallucinations is the need of the human ego to get its way against real¬ity, to dominate reality in imagination when it can not dominate in fact. For these reasons, it seems to me that there can be no final form in any art and no set limit to its scope. The form of the novel will continue to change as intellect devises new pat¬terns to include new dreams from the subconscious; and these dreams will alter and enlarge the scope of the novel as the human ego enlarges its experience of the reality which it is trying to dominate. The difference between the romantic novel and the realistic will be a difference in the manner of this domination—the real¬ist attempting to subdue reality by understanding it and the romanticist to defeat reality by escaping from it. The humorous fictionist will seek to raise himself above reality by laugh¬ing at it. The crusading novelist will make war on reality and try to over¬come it with reforms. The most popular American novel in the past has been the romantic, be¬cause the great need of the American psyche has been to escape the pres¬sure of reality. American humor has long supported us in a feeling of su¬periority to reality by helping us to laugh at it. Now the crusading novel q becoming popular in its appeal to is to change a reality which we have neither escaped nor laughed out of ex¬istence. It remains for us to produce an artist—and a public to support him —who shall seek to dominate reality by knowing it and understanding it and accepting it as it is. The future form and scope of the American novel will probably be in his hands.